Rollo May Quotes

Humor is the healthy way of feeling "distance" between one's self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one's problem with perspective.

When I fall in love, I feel more valuable and I treat myself with more care. We have all observed the hesitant adolescent, uncertain of himself, who, when he or she falls in love, suddenly walks with a certain inner assuredness and confidence, a mien which seems to say, "You are looking at somebody now." For this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.

Humans have a habit of running faster when they have lost their way.

The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.

Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying.

Forge in the smithy of your soul.

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one's identity as a being of worth and dignity.

Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.

Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied; and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form.

Insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation.

Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.

In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person's development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs - not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.

... what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.

Evil, in this system of ethics, is that which tears apart, shuts out the other person, raises barriers, sets people against each other.

There is no meaningful yes unless the individual could also have said no.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)

Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.

It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.

Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)

The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.

By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance.

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being.

To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say he is lazy: It simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked.

Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom.

Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center.

Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day.

The individual human is still the creature who can wonder, who can be enchanted by a sonata, who can place symbols together to make poetry to gladden our heart, who can view a sunrise with a sense of majesty and awe.

Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union

All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.

What anxiety means is it's as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It's what makes us human beings.

Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.

Courage is required not only in a person's occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.

Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche's phrase, Follow not me, but you!

There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.

Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects — as the wonderful new heaven and earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced. Love is the answer, we sing. Our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic - albeit desperate - conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros.

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.